Monthly Archives: April 2012

One of the thing that I regret with my work is that although I just love it, I end up running aroung a lot. And eventually this impacts my social life. There are friends I don’t see as often as I’d like and this makes me sad.

So when I got my hand on the 5D Mark III the first thing I wanted to do was to test it in real situation, and I contacted one of my dear friends to ask her for a cup of coffee and also for a photoshoot. This way I could combine shooting, testing and reconcile all this with my social life.

I may be a genius.

… Or not, because in the end I ended up with more work. Well it was worth it!

Anyway I was very glad that I got to spend a few hours with Valérie. She is a gorgeous girl and I always appreciate talking to her! It was really refreshing. And I just love her smile it is freaking amazing!

Sonya and Damien met when they were still students. They weren’t attending the same place but that didn’t prevent them from falling in love. In fact Sonya pretty much spent all her time at Damien’s school. So she was acknowledged by all of his friends and it was as if she actually were a student over there.

What is really great about Damien’s school is that it is all about brotherhood. All the alumni stay very connected to the place and they help nurse the freshmen. You really feel that everyone is very tight over there, so it was only fitting that they decided to have their engagement shoot at this school which helped shaped them.

The grounds over there are just gorgeous, both of them were there to have fun and we sure had a lot! These two just love dancing and at a time we even wiped some good old LMFAO. This looks promising for the wedding!

Ok folks I know that some of you have been waiting for this. Here are my first impressions about the 5D Mark III.

I had the opportunity to shoot with it during normal assignements and I have been using it in quite a few actual case scenario. And so far I am loving it!

Don’t expect me to provide a detailled technical review of this camera. There are better sources around the internet where you will find more comprehensive / technical / detailed information.

First you have to understand what I expected from the camera. I have been shooting with the original 5D and the 5D Mark II so I am pretty precise about what I was looking for in the successor of these two work horses.

I have always loved the 5D line: what I really liked was that the image quality was always over the top. I still think that for the price you pay, nothing beats it.

However, like a lot of people I have always been disapointed by some of the poor features of the body:

Crappy AF: I have always used the central point to capture all my photos. So I have always been focusing and recomposing for as long as I have been shooting 5Ds. And it has been a pain. Moreover the AF has always been very poor in low light conditions. And when you are a wedding photographer and shooting in caves like I do you can understand how limiting this can be.

Poor materials used for the body construction : simply enough the body itself doesn’t scream professional camera. It could always feel more sturdy.

Very poor viewfinder : I wear glasses and the viewfinder on the previous 5D iterations has always been very hard to work with. It was far from being comfortable. It doesn’t let a lot of light in, I don’t have a 100% coverage and let’s face it I have never been able to manually focus a lens reliably 100% of the time.

So here we are, these were my main gripes about the 5Ds.

After a few days and lot more photoshoots all I can tell is that Canon has finally done it! They have managed to release the camera I was waiting for.

The image quality is still incredible. Moreover I can say that the colors of the 5D Mark III are in my opinion better that the Mark II out of camera. The Mark II colors used to feel a bit funky to me (yes funky is a very technical term). For example the reds were always a bit too much… red (as I said this is not a technical review).

The AF is finally reliable and usable. It is incredible, I had a hard time at the beginning to not focus and recompose, but now I am getting there. The AF is just awesome. I can finally totally rely on it and I have had consirably less missed shots than I used to. It’s fast (depending on your lens), it can focus waaaaay better in the low lights conditions (still not perfect but there is a net improvement) and it just works!

The camera itself feels good in the hand. You can sense that the construction is way better. It also fits better in my hand, though if I had to say I think the grip is a bit shorter so shooters with bigger hands than mine may find it uncomfortable.

The viewfinder is simply great. I have a better time with it so no worries

The ISO performance is also awesome. I had one photoshoot in an old chapel and to try things out (yeah I do experiments during my clients shoots) I decided to bump the ISO to 16 000 and I was bluffed by the result. Hardly any grain. It looks like when I shoot with the MarkII at ISO 4000. I even tried to push to 25600 and all I have to say is that the photos I got are very usable. so wow jus wow.

All of these more than justify the investment for me! With the AF alone I would have been sold so the whole package is a killer. And all I have to say is that the support for Eye-Fi card is just the cherry on top for me.